Dante's Inferno

So I was visiting my folks' place the other weekend, and in the evening went hunting from the bookshelves for something to read. One thing I picked up was Dante's Inferno -- assigned in a class in college, I failed in a half-dozen attempts to read past the first 10 pages or so. Now 20 years later I've finally finished it.

(In hindsight, a major reason that I couldn't finish it before is that I've got a translation by Mark Musa for Penguin Classics -- pictured above -- and the guy went nuts with the annotations: 60-page introduction, header summary to each Canto, and Notes after each Canto, frequently longer than the text itself. The header summary in particular gives away all the plot in advance, and then you have to slog through the longer poetry about stuff you already know is going to happen -- that's what killed me in college. By avoiding those header summaries, I could read it the other week and find it fresh and compelling.)

Now, there's not a whole lot to say about it beyond what people like Milton, Longfellow, T.S. Eliot, Rodin, Mike Watt, and an imperial legion of literature PHDs haven't already said. But I figured it's worth a few bullet points here, seeing as it directly contributed its nine-descending-concentric-circles architecture to the D&D conception of Hell -- from Gygax's first presentation of the Outer Planes in Dragon #8, to devils in the AD&D Monster Manual, Greenwood's influential articles on the subject, and all the way to 4E today -- with some slight topical/naming rearrangements. (D&D's Heaven is similarly inspired by the structure of Dante's Purgatorio/Paradiso.) So here goes:

1. It's torture porn. There's no other way to put it. The truly enduring allure of the Inferno is the monumental creativity behind pages and pages and pages of ingenious, surprisingly graphic, ever-mounting tortures inflicted upon the damned in hell, and the quasi-ironic poetic justice (contrapasso) which relates each punishment to the associated sin and sub-sin. Much like a modern Saw movie, you can wrap this in a facade of moral meditation, but the deeper attraction is really not that. You get the same moral themes in Purgatorio and Paradisio, but most people don't bother to read those.
2. The classical allusions are great. For some reason it's still exciting (in a comic-book-crossover-kind-of-way) to see Dante's character running into, and interacting with, some legendary figure in each section such as Virgil, Homer, Odysseus, Achilles, Caesar, etc., etc. Dante sets an intriguing, powerful model for melding Christian with Classical mythology -- including positions for Cerberus, Centaurs, the Minotaur, Medusa, and the Titans in the Christian cosmos -- much like Original D&D's establishment of Catholic clerics adventuring against an almost all-Greek-myth cast of antagonists (OD&D Vol-1 and 2). However, I'm now enormously sensitive to the faultlines of this approach: Are the Centaurs in Hell being punished, or are they devils themselves? If the Titans (and others) still shudder from Zeus' casting them down into the pit, how is it that Zeus and the other Olympian gods are themselves missing from the cosmology? Stuff like that.
3. The 14th-century Italian references kind of suck. In contrast to the preceding, Dante's character actually spends more time constantly running into contemporary Florentines and other Italians, speaking with them at length, and grinding various axes against rivals, competing merchant clans, out-of-favor politicians, etc. These are a bunch of people you've never heard of before, and really couldn't care about -- much like a TV show with too many topical references, it's aged fast compared to the other parts, and it's rather a bore to slog through these sections. Unfortunately, somewhat more ink is spent on these characters than the classical ones above. (Kudos to the translator Musa from providing annotations to all of these, although the fact that he included equally-long notes identifying who are Caesar, Achilles, Hannibal, the Minotaur, etc., makes it look pretty goofy.)
   

Part of me is left with a desire to sit down and write a top-to-bottom D&D campaign directly out of Dante's Inferno (sticking more closely to the text than the D&D version), but possibly someone's already done and/or published that at this point -- and in addition, I'm sort of committed to avoiding the Christian church/mythology in my own games these days, so it wouldn't mesh very well with other stuff I do. The overall construction and specification of Dante's Inferno remains novel and absolutely compelling (particularly to a math-oriented guy like myself).

Here's a couple cool ideas I'd consider using in a D&D campaign right now:

• The circle of Sorcerers has this intriguing passage:
  

  They built a city over her dead bones,
  and for her, the first to choose that place, they named it
  Mantua, without recourse to sorcery. [Canto XX, lines 91-93]
  

  So, this has two interesting seeds within it. One is to make it a practice of founding your cities over the bones of dead wizards for some sort of protective-power effect (I'm quickly thinking of Lankhmar's lich-like defenders here). The other related practice is to require a divinatory spell (contact other plane) to actually get some higher power to tell you the proper name of the place. (As Musa writes in the notes here, "The customs of ancient peoples dictated that the name of a newly founded city be obtained through sorcery.")
  
  
• The other idea is how to name your devils -- specifically, pick some simple descriptive phrase and run it through an online Italian translator, and you get an authentic-sounding, baroque Hellish name (at least to my ear). That's effectively what Dante did for his Malebranche devils in Canto XXI, and of course those were transcribed directly into the writeup on the same kind of devil in the AD&D Monster Manual (p. 22). Some quick examples: "Strong Hand" = "Manoforte", "Knobby Leg" = "Manopolagamba", "Angry Face" = "Facciarrabbiata". (I suppose this will be a lot less impressive if you actually know Italian, but I'm fond of it.)

(As a final aside, my picking up Dante's Inferno doesn't have anything to do with the recent EA video game using the same title -- that's just a coincidence.)

DMG Appendix A

In the last post, I made some analysis of Gygax's Dungeon Geomorphs product. I've also been playing around recently with AD&D DMG Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation. Let's use the insights to the former product to fill in some of the hidden assumptions in the latter. When using Appendix A, I would highlight or recommend the following:

1. To start with, you should normally begin by going directly to a random room on Table V. (The "Start Areas" on p. 169 are visually arresting, but that's actually a secondary, optional start possibility. You don't want to re-use those a lot.)
2. The tables probably generate more 45-degree passages and 20'-wide corridors than Gygax himself would actually use by default. Be ready to ignore or override those results a lot if they don't fit well into your map; in particular, I make all 45-degree passages automatically 10' wide (ignoring the fact -- as Gygax did -- that running along vertices on the graph paper, they're really just 7' wide).
   
3. Rooms and Chambers (square/rectangular) should, for convenience, always be set up on the cardinal axes -- if accessed off a 45-degree passage, you should probably automatically make them Triangular or Trapezoidal. In addition, all Triangular/Trapezoidal rooms may as well be right-angled, setting them along the grid axes, and giving them a single 45-degree diagonal wall. Any side passage or "door ahead" in a 45-degree corridor should be set along a cardinal-direction, unless it explicitly states the angle at which it should be.
   
4. By default, Rooms should have Doors, and Chambers should have Passages (i.e., non-door openings) as exits. This isn't explicitly stated anywhere, but it's implied in places like Table I (corridors empty into chambers but never rooms), Table II (doors open to rooms 4 times more often than chambers), and Table V-C (result of 19-20 indicates exceptional case of "door in chamber, passage in room").
5. Note that the treasure containment tables (Tables V-H through V-J) are copied verbatim from the earlier Monster & Treasure Assortment product. Tables V-I and V-J (guarded by/hidden in) stand out in Appendix A because they don't have any game statistics associated with the entries. Particularly for solo play, I recommend ignoring these tables (per the "if desired" note -- contrast to Table VII: Trick/Trap, etc.)
6. Also, when making Rooms/Chambers for solo play, I change the generation order to (i) Room shape/size on Table V, (ii) Contents on Table V-F, and last (iii) Exits on Table V-C, etc. This lets any fight be played out before consideration of egress, which cognitively feels better to me (e.g., see the recent discussion on when room size/detail description is appropriate).
7. Note the somewhat unusual secret-door detection rates (by d20) on Table VII, result 1-5. I use this for all indicated secret door checks in Appendix A.
8. Finally, I delete the entry on Table III for "passage X's", since I don't like how it treats cardinal-versus-diagonal passages asymmetrically (i.e., biased towards yet more diagonal passages).
   

Item (3) seems particularly important to me. When using Appendix A in the past, I would tend to get into a diagonal corridor (e.g., Table III actually generates more 45-degree side passages than 90-degree ones), and from that point on I'd be struggling to draw a whole connected region of rectangular rooms, chambers, and passages all diagonal to the graph paper. If you think about it, that really abandons all the advantages to drawing on graph paper in the first place.

If we instead re-set to the cardinal grid every time we enter a room or chamber, then we get more limited diagonal elements, less frustration for DM & players alike, and a dungeon much more like the designs Gygax had in mind when he was laying out maps such as those in the Dungeon Geomorphs and other products.

Dungeon Geomorphs

This is the first of a two-part post on early dungeon layout tools, both by Gary Gygax. This first (longer, I expect) post is on the Dungeon Geomorphs product crica 1976-1980. The second one will be on AD&D DMG Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, and what some of the unstated assumptions might be for that resource.

The Dungeon Geomorphs were originally 3 separate products published in 1976 and 1977. (My digital version of the collected set -- as shown above -- doesn't actually credit Gygax anywhere, but his name was on the cover of the earlier sets that you can see at the Acaeum site over here.)

Thus, there are 3 different "sets" of geomorphs, identified as "Basic Dungeon", "Caves & Caverns", and "Lower Dungeons". Each has 15 different sections of dungeon architecture (lettered A-O) that can be combined and connected in different ways to create unique dungeon layouts. Each page of the product has 3 sections: 2 sections 21x21 squares each, and 1 section sized 10x42 squares (each square 10', per the introduction). All together, my estimate is that there's upwards of 1,000 separate rooms and passages pictured in the Geomorphs, so it provides a good look at Gygax's design sensibilities at the time.

First, a quick sense of each of the different set types:

1. Basic Dungeon. The first thing that strikes me here is that almost the entirety of each map page is covered with accessible rooms -- there is almost no "dark space" of solid rock to speak of. (Module B1, 1st level is the only other dungeon product that looks similar to me.) While it's easy to get lost here, the overall sense is one of "openness", of being able to access every part of the map with some effort. There are lots of rooms here (estimate: 35 rooms and 20 passages per map section).
   
2. Caves and Caverns. As to be expected, these levels have irregular, rough-hewn tunnels and cave systems. There's a lot more dark space, as adjacent areas are almost always separated by at least 10' of rock (instead of thin one-line walls like in the Basic Dungeon). Caves tend to be larger than the rooms elsewhere, and unlike the other sets, there are no doors anywhere. Due to the larger sized caves, there are far fewer of them per page (estimate: 6 caves and 20 tunnels per section).
3. Lower Dungeons. The lower dungeons have more of a "claustrophobic" feel to them. There's more dark space than in the Basic Dungeon (a balance between thin-line and 10' block room dividers), and I think the rooms are, on average, smaller. There are more odd-shaped rooms, zig-zag passages, several isolated 30' circles (possibly chutes/shafts bypassing the level?), a number of 10x10' room maze areas with many doors, etc. There are more rooms than in the caves levels, but fewer than the Basic Dungeon (estimate: 20 rooms and 20 passages per section).
   

Now, considerations of features shared across the different set types:

Doors: Excepting the Caves levels, there are doors (and secret doors) indicated throughout the different sections, although some rooms are missing doors, and thus disconnected from the rest. (The Introduction makes clear that you're expected add doors, delete or modify areas, etc.) There are a small number of these disconnected rooms in the Basic Dungeon, and a larger number of them in the Lower Dungeons areas (some sections more than others).

Passages: The vast majority of passages, corridors, and tunnels are 10' wide, rarely 20', and never any larger than that. About half of the Basic Dungeon tiles (8 of 15) have a single straight piece of 20' wide corridor, stretching about two-thirds the way across the tile. Arguably, there are no 20' corridors in any of the Caves or Lower sets; there are some 20' wide areas which might be interpreted as either cave/rooms or corridors, but in any case they're much shorter than in the Basic Dungeon. Even in the Caves levels, there are many 10' wide tunnels that run straight along a cardinal direction (to me, reminiscent of the sample tunnel sections in the module D1-3 product).

Central Areas: A common feature shared across all the sets is that each provides 3 sections that can be joined to create an enormous central area location -- perhaps a grand Arena/Cavern/Temple area. (Respectively these are sections ILF, ILO, and ILO in each of the 3 sets.) If joined, each of the versions of the huge central feature is about 22 squares on each side or somewhat larger (i.e., over 200 feet square).

Diagonals: One issue that motivated this overall article was the burning question: "How many diagonal features did Gygax expect to use on a typical dungeon map?". While design elements in the four cardinal directions (NSEW) are easy to deal with on graph paper, those on a non-cardinal 45 degree axis (NE, NW, SE, SW) tend to aggravate me, my players, my geometry sensibilities, and my software projects (see here). So I'll pay particularly close attention to those elements, to see how widespread they were expected to be.

Here's an overview of the diagonal situation: (1) While diagonal passages appear on almost every dungeon section, they are limited in scope -- usually only 30' of corridor or so. (2) Diagonal passages are always 10' wide, never a 20' wide passage or anything bigger. And importantly: (3) Practically every square/rectangular room in the product (the vast majority of rooms) is oriented in the cardinal direction, regardless of whether the approaching corridors are on a diagonal or not. (There are only two exceptional occurrences of square rooms oriented on the diagonal -- one in Basic Dungeon Section N, upper left corner; and a pair of connected rooms in Lower Dungeons Section C, upper left corner.)

Finally, a listing of recurring unusual room shape elements (having noted that the vast majority of rooms are square or rectangular in shape):

1. Circles. In the Basic Dungeon, there are some 20' wide circular areas, each one a dead-end with no door (4 of these). There are a few 30' wide round areas (3 of these), in each case the nexus of 4 diagonal corridors. As noted earlier, the Lower Dungeons have some 30' wide circular rooms (3) that are almost totally disconnected from their surroundings. There are also 3 zones of sweeping, curved corridor around these areas.
2. Triangles. Where a diagonal corridor is placed, this tends to create a triangular room on each side, at least in the Basic Dungeon sections (or else possibly a trapezoid; see below). Practically all of these are right-angle isosceles triangles (i.e., a right angle and two equal sides; or, a 45-45-90 degree triangle). Generally, the two equal legs are on the cardinal axes, with the hypotenuse on the diagonal -- in the Basic Dungeon, this is true 46/53 = 87% of the time, while in the Lower Dungeons it's only true 14/27 = 52% of the time. In the Lower Dungeons, it's common to construct triangular rooms by chopping a 20x20' square room in half (5 instances) or to cut one large "cardinal" triangle into two smaller "off-cardinal" triangles (3 instances).
3. Trapezoids. Where a diagonal corridor doesn't create a triangular room to the side, it might create a right-angle trapezoid -- almost a rectangle, but with one diagonal wall (at least in the Basic Dungeon). In almost every case of this, 3 walls are connected by right angles and lay in the cardinal directions; the 4th connecting wall is on the 45-degree diagonal.
   
4. Octagons. There are several locations in the Basic Dungeon (5) with 30'-wide octagons, always used in a similar fashion to the 30' circles -- as the junction for a 4-way corridor intersection. In these cases, the corridors are always running in the cardinal directions (not diagonal).
5. Stepwise. This would be a room that was perhaps trying to be triangular or trapezoidal, but was made "pixellated", with one or two of the walls running zig-zag along the boundaries between grid squares. This happens several times (6) in the Lower Dungeons.
   

Typical usage of each of these element types can be seen below:

Booming Boars

A bit of confusion today, I think purely due to my own curtness, as to whether I think giant boars are a good idea for a monster or not. As penance I'll post what I've been working on today a bit earlier than planned. Everything in the quote box below is designated as Open Game Content, as per the Open Game License Version 1.0a:

BOOMING BOARS

Number: 1-6
Armor Class: 5
Move: 15"
Hit Dice: 5
% in Lair: Nil
Treasure Type: Nil
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d6+2

Booming boars appear to be large but possibly normal boars or warthogs, 4' high at the shoulder. However, they have an explosive sonic/belching attack that can affect anyone in a cone-shaped area 6" by 3". Targets must save versus paralysis or become deafened (1d6 turns) and stunned (1d3 rounds). Individual boars can only belch once per day, but those in a group (called "sounders") may stagger their sonic attacks over several rounds (roll 3-in-6 for each boar to belch in any round). They are themselves immune to sonic attacks.

Radioactive Boars

Oddly, just last night I was scratching out the "Giant Hogs" entry in my OD&D encounter tables (actually Sup-I) as being too ridiculous for me -- and then I run into this article on the proliferation of actual "Radioactive Boars" today in Germany, here (a long-term effect from the Chernobyl meltdown). So perhaps that's inspiration if you run a post-nuke flavored campaign.

EDIT: I'm just talking about them being so common deep in dungeons, not that I'd avoid using them in general.

Room Sizes

A little idea as I get back into things -- In some adventure products you get boxed-text room descriptions like, "The double doors open into a courtyard that is 80 feet deep and 90 feet wide. Once well cared for, the dirt floor is now choked with weeds. In the center of the yard sits a large pool, etc., etc." [D&D Module B7 Rahasia, Tracy & Laura Hickman, area #2]

There's a debate to be had about whether giving the room dimensions (80×90 feet) at this point is justified. Cognitively, you'd think that (a) the PC's attention would be first attracted to the stuff in front of them (especially any hostile monsters!) before dimensional details, and also (b) to get exact footage you'd probably have to get in, explore, and pace it off. The counter-argument, I suppose, might be that letting the players draw the area on the party map allows them to mentally situate themselves there. Sometimes I go back-and-forth about whether the dimensions should be the first thing described, or the last.

Here's a synthesis: Give the players some notion of room size first, quickly, by just using the terms "small, medium, or large". Only give exact dimensions after a fight has been resolved, and exploration/ searching/ pacing/ mapping is possible. Of course, this requires some kind of consistency in your "size" descriptions, such that you're playing fair with the players. Here goes after a bit of research:

• Small -- Up to 200 square feet (10×10 or 10×20). Small living quarters or chapel.
• Medium -- Up to 2,000 square feet (from 20×20, 30' diameter around, to 30×60 or 40×50, etc.). Tower central room, guard hall, castle kitchen, big living quarters.
• Large -- Up to 20,000 square feet (from 50×50, up to 50×100, max 100×200). Keep great hall, largest DMG Appendix A room/ chamber/ cave size.
• Huge -- Up to 200,000 square feet (from 100×200, 150×350m, max 400×500). Major cathedral, largest DMG Appendix A cavern size.

Back To Posting

I've had to take off most of June & July in order to deal with some band stuff, and also to teach a pair of accelerated summer math classes. Hopefully I'll be back to some D&D writing, blog posts, and replies to email & comments that have been sitting here for a while.

And if I don't, I'll come back and erase this so I don't look like a big doofus. :-)